Category Eat

There are so many great reasons to grow your own herbal teas. Having a range of herbs on your doorstep, each with varying flavours and health benefits, is the main one. You will also have fresh organic tea available whenever you feel like having a cuppa. By growing your herbs organically, you are avoiding hidden pesticides and herbicides, as well as saving yourself money. And finally you are reducing waste and reducing the environmental footprint involved in bringing tea from a commercial grower to your kitchen.

As long as you have a few different plants growing you will always have a cup of herbal tea available for yourself or when visitors pop by. Here are some of our favourites.

As superfood fads go, the movement towards eating insects has a lot of hype, but is less commonly adopted. An untapped source of protein, high in amino acids, wildly abundant, easy to grow, with a tiny ecological footprint—the sales pitch sounds great to most of us until we’re presented with a dish of mealworms.

There’s something taboo about the idea of eating creepy crawlies in the Western world, but according to its proponents, entomophagy (the practice of eating insects on purpose) is going to get a whole lot bigger, despite the small size of its heroes.

The French eat snails, Mexican and Thai people are wellknown for their fondness for crickets, and even our homegrown witchetty grubs and honey ants are part of traditional Australian ‘bush tucker’ folklore.

For most of us however, eating insects (beyond say, a few stray aphids on our homegrown brassica leaves) is pretty low down on our to-do lists. Perhaps it’s because in the West we see insects as dirt dwelling vectors of disease. Or perhaps it has more to do with our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, where insects were almost never deemed to be ‘kosher’. Or perhaps there’s something deeper too.

In Natural Cheesemaking we work with nature, instead of against nature, to make cheese. By using a starter that we make at home, harnessing the rich microbial ecology in raw milk, and honouring traditional cheesemaking methods, we can create cheeses that are more healthy, delicious and complex in flavour.

Cheesemaking should be a simple and natural process. But anyone who’s made cheese according to the standard approach will attest that cheese is no longer created according to any natural considerations. First milk is pasteurised, standardised and homogenised, then monocultures of microorganisms are added back to replace the life taken away by pasteurisation. Genetically modified enzymes are then mixed into milk to cause it to curdle, and the curds left to drain in plastic forms. And all the while cheesemakers need to keep everything sterile to assure that their sensitive laboratory raised cultures aren’t contaminated by rogue microorganisms.

Preserving tomatoes is one of the easiest ways to get a homemade larder started. Over summer and autumn, tomatoes are so abundant, whether you grow them yourself or buy them by the box from your favourite fruit and veg shop or market. If you’re organised and ready to give preserving tomatoes a go, it’s quite possible to bottle, dry and brew up a year’s supply of tomato sauces and condiments in a timely fashion. Yes, you may well be splashed red by the end of the process, but that’s what summer preserving is all about, isn’t it?

Both big and small tomatoes are fine for preserving, but you may want to approach them in different ways. There are ‘sauce tomatoes’ like Roma and San Marzano; tomatoes that have been bred to be fleshy instead of juicy, so you get more sauce per tomato. But any tomato will work for the below techniques, so use whatever you can get hold of.

If you’re growing tomatoes, preserving needs to fit in with your schedule as you’ll be doing a bit here, a bit there, as they ripen over the season. If you’re buying tomatoes by the box, it’s more a case of setting aside a few days to get it all done at once. Go, go, tomato!

The fruits and aromatic leaves of the tropical and subtropical rainforests of Eastern Australia provide a whole new palette of spices, fragrances and flavours for the adventurous cook. These uniquely Australian flavours, merged with the creativity stimulated by living in a multicultural society, readily give rise to an endless array of culinary innovations.

It’s surprising how many of these plants are frequently included in regular landscapes, native gardens and public plantings in parks and streetscapes in Sydney and further south; some are quite frost hardy.

Most of our subtropical bush foods come from rainforest understorey environments; sheltered, frost-free microclimates with dappled shade. In the garden these understorey plants will grow successfully under the canopy of taller trees or in protected areas close to the house where they receive some shade throughout the day or are less exposed to frost. It’s also surprising how well many rainforest plants grow in full sun, and more sunshine definitely increases yields of fruiting plants.

People have been preserving food forever. Before the invention of fridges, knowing how to preserve your harvest by salting and drying meats or fermenting vegetables was an absolute necessity. These days the need for preserving may seem to have disappeared, but we feel it’s as important as ever. We still see preserving your harvest as a fundamental part of living a full life. It’s in our blood: there is a deep satisfaction in preparing a larder so that you can enjoy foods that are out of season all year round.

There is no better time to learn to preserve than when summer is in full swing. Everything is ‘in’ and no other time of the year feels quite so abundant. Sometimes the late summer harvest can be so abundant that it’s quite overwhelming! Having a few preservation tricks up your sleeve will mean you are ready for anything. And winter will feel that little bit sunnier when you can pull out the summer treats you stored away.

There are loads of ways to preserve, but let’s focus on one of the most ancient: lacto-fermentation, an ancient technique that has kept humans healthy and fed for thousands of years. It preserves by helping the good bacteria (lactobacilli) overpower the bad.

Eka is an urban forager. She wants to show people how they can maintain a normal lifestyle with a nine-to-five job and still lead a secret life as a forager.

Can you describe the foods you harvest from the ‘wild’ and how you do it?

I am lucky to live in Melbourne’s northern suburbs (aka the European fruit forest), and I mainly forage for fruit as it’s an easy and ubiquitous target. I follow the ‘if it’s facing the footpath it’s yours’ rule: as a tree grower myself, I expect anything facing the street to be picked. In summer/autumn most of my fruit was supplied by the neighbourhood: figs, prickly pears, mulberries, grapes, apples, pears and lemons. Another good rule is to ask the grower. Usually people are happy to share.

Anyone interested in edible gardening tends to grow vegetables, but have you ever considered growing edible flowers?

When you start looking into which flowers are edible, it is surprising to find that most gardeners have at least one variety of edible flower growing in their garden. The wonderful thing about growing flowers for food is that it gives you a good reason to take up growing space with them. Ideally our gardens are filled not only with vegetables and greens, but also flowers for us and the bees.

There are many varieties of edible flowers, but these top five are easy to grow, and perform well. Flowers can stay fresh for hours after picking – but avoid the heat of the day, and place the stems in water until you use them.

Creating a truly local meal–where every part of the meal is produced locally–can be a challenge, but once you get into it, it is also quite addictive. It takes a bit of a mind shift – to look at the harvest first, then let the imagination run wild, and lastly find a recipe for final inspiration.

Traditional recipes have often been developed around harvest time, so finding recipes from somewhere with a climate similar to your own is a great place to start. We now have access to so many plants from different parts of the world that we can get creative, mixing and matching cultural tastes while eating from our own gardens.

When you consider the harvest first, you need to start by looking deeper into what is actually available in the garden, often using plants, and parts of plants, that are otherwise overlooked. This may mean using the same ingredients every day for weeks, so getting creative becomes increasingly important.

What would happen if we taught our children that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people planted crops, tilled them, irrigated them, stored and preserved surpluses, built houses and sewed their clothes? Would the sky fall in? And why would we teach them such things? Because that’s what the explorers saw.

Charles Sturt’s exploration party of 1844 was saved from death when it chanced upon four hundred Aboriginal people harvesting grain on the Warburton River (South Australia), in what was to become known as Sturt’s Stony Desert. Sturt and his men were revived with cool well-water, roast duck and the best cakes Sturt had ever tasted. Once recovered, the party was offered a new house in the orderly town that lined the bank of the river.